For authors, choosing a book cover is the fraught moment their very private creation starts putting on its game face and getting ready to enter the market. For cover designers, it can also be the beginning of their own struggle on behalf of their favorite ideas.
A proposed cover can be killed for any number of reasons. It’s too dark. It’s too light. (White covers don’t look good on Amazon.) It looks too much like Y.A. fiction. It won’t appeal to men. And the death blow can come from any direction: not just from then author and the agent, but from the publisher, the in-house sales force or buyers for the major retailers, who have been known to reduce the size of an order unless a cover is changed.
Designers can generate as many as 50 covers for high-profile books, though a half-dozen or so is more typical. Below are some killed covers whose creators couldn’t quite let them rest in peace.
(Editor’s note: That Charlotte Roche cover for Wetlands is way better than what they ended up with. Designing a book cover is on my bucket list.)
